Narrative Analysis Complementing Results of Computer-Aided Text Analysis

executives in order to assess what characteristics and experiences make female executives successful in a male dominated position of power. Five comparisons were made between Male and Female CEOs: mother and father roles, the role of schooling and early work experiences, the role of other important childhood experiences, the role of mentors, role models, and networking, and the role of visibility in progression and the source of the CEO appointment opportunity

(Fitzsimmons, Callan, Paulsen 2013). Based on these comparisons, I found that Viola Turner shared many traits with the Female CEOs based on my analysis of the interview conducted in April of 1979 by Walter Weare. My analysis of Turner’s interview, which included the findings of the interviews conducted with male and female CEOs, revealed not only many shared

characteristics between herself and female CEOs but also some diverging characteristics.

In regards to Turner’s early childhood development, she shared almost identical

experiences with the female CEOs in regards to their mother’s role in their development, with the exception of a strong sense of support for males that Turner experienced. Like the mothers of most female CEOs, her mother exemplified the traits listed in Figure 1, but she also perpetuated the male dominance stereotype, despite Turner’s belief that her mother retained the dominant control over the family unit (Weare, 45).

Her father, however, played a smaller role in her development of leadership traits, which is a large divergence from the fathers of female CEOs. Turner only cited the major influence of her father being his work ethic and integrity. Unlike the CEOs, she did not feel she was treated as a boy would have been and expressed the exact opposite impression (Weare, 3). This perception of her father’s small role in her leadership development places Turner outside of the norm for the female CEOs that may have contributed to her diverted rise into leadership. This difference represents an interesting paradox because Turner was not obtaining social capital in a typical way, through being raised as if she were a male child. This represents another diverging experience between Turner and the female CEOs as Turner knew that she was treated differently than a male would have been treated (Fitzsimmons, Callan, and Paulsen, 254).

Figure 1. Mother and Father Roles

Turner had almost identical responses to the female CEO respondents in regards to the role of schooling in developing leadership traits, Figure 2, diverging only on the role school had on her development of leadership. Her experiences at Morris Brown, specifically, nurtured her leadership skills when she was a teaching assistant for some of her mentor’s classes (Weare, 10).

It is difficult to pinpoint the difference this one trait development environment had on Turner’s success but the confidence stemming from experiences like these can certainly be seen

throughout her career (Weare, 59).

Figure 3. The Role of Other Important Childhood Experiences

Other childhood experiences represent a singularly major divergence of Turner in

comparison to both the female and male CEO respondents. This divergence could be attributed to mitigating circumstances surrounding Turner’s childhood including low income, racial stigma, and sexual discrimination, all of which precluded her from participating in sports and leisure travel with the exception of her grandmother’s farmhouse (Weare, 30). She did participate in choir, which, due to the aforementioned reasons does fill the role of a structured pastime. This activity potentially contributed a similar experience as team sports due to the nature of the task and requirement of teamwork. This team experience along with the death of her mother at the age of sixteen, a major disruption, encouraged the development of her self-efficacy.

Due to the aforementioned mitigating circumstances that impacted Turner more than they did the CEO respondents, it is difficult to ascertain the comparative benefits of these influences.

Therefore, Figure 3 does not carry the same weight in regards to comparing Turner’s

development of leadership skills and places heavier weight on the previous Figures exhibiting the effect of other childhood experiences.

The role of professional experiences is examined exclusively within the career context in Figure 4, including the roles of professional mentors as role models, networking, and

promotions.

Figure 4. The Role of Mentors, Role Models, and Networking

The presence of mentors was important for both male and female CEOs but with different implications for either gender as Figure 4 shows. Females claimed their mentors gave them

“clear guidance…, integrity, and stewardship” (Fitzsimmons, Callan, and Paulsen, 2013, p. 256).

Male CEO respondents echoed these claims but only half of them claimed to have had influential mentors (Fitzsimmons, Callan, and Paulsen, 256). Turner mentioned several mentors and role models, but the head of her business school, Mrs. Thompson, was mentioned as particularly influential in pushing her forward, having integrity in her work, and developing integrity and self-efficacy in her work (Weare, 49). Aside from developing business skills, the CEO respondents also had to develop social capital in order to be effective in their executive roles.

Mentors aid this process by providing roadways to more accessible social capital than it is accessible in closed office environments and in tiered industry conventions. Turner diverged from both genders of CEO respondents in respect to networking. She neither kept in touch religiously with old acquaintances nor participated actively in industry or professional conventions. Her involvement, rather, centered on social and religious clubs but even within these groups, Turner seemed to be relatively private, actively keeping her business and personal associations separate.

Figure 5. The Role of Visibility in Progression

In regards to role visibility and progression, it is noticeable in Figure 5 that female CEOs often held more jobs and moved outside of their original industries, some moving several times, in order to bypass “blockages” in their career path (Fitzsimmons, Callan, and Paulsen, 256, 2013). Male CEO respondents did not encounter these blockages and could follow clearly focused career development plans. The result for females was “less specific industry experience, but a broader range of experience across similar issues in different industries” (Fitzsimmons, Callan, and Paulsen, 256, 2013). Turner did change industries, moving from education into insurance, but she experienced the bulk of her training and advancement in the insurance industry. This specialized industry experience could account for her great industry success despite her slower start.

As a whole, Turner had similar experiences to the female CEO respondents in regards to their early experiences and adult habitus, forming a common pool of experiences from which successful leadership skills are forged. Additionally, Turner’s cemented sexual identity was a product of her era, indicating that women’s success is irrevocably tied to accumulating social capital as with male professionals. These differences in acquiring social capital, however, could be the origin of Turner’s divergent path to success.

In her article, Riad (2011) examines the shifting nature of Cleopatra’s reputation deriving its implications for the modern concept of a leader. The reason for researching Cleopatra was her role as a “different” leader that is relevant to modern female leaders that act as “outliers.” While the differences between Cleopatra and Viola Turner are pronounced, with Cleopatra reigning over Egypt and its far-flung kingdom and Turner occupying a Vice Presidency position in Finance, they both challenged the masculine archetype for leadership and shook up their male dominated environments.

Raid’s explanation of how Cleopatra could have had such a contradictory historical leadership role centers on the presence of binaries in regards to assigning power in human relationships. These binaries revolve around the basic power relationship between humans and include male/female, follower/leader, and adult/child. These binaries were common in highly structured societies, such as Ancient Egypt who framed female power in regards to “the other”

(Raid 834). Relevant binaries to Viola Turner include leader/follower and male/female, where leader and male hold the position of higher power. Power comes into play with binaries as it is used to fix the meaning of one side of the binary in a more favorable position by giving them authority over the other.

This binary structure does not relate only to social relationships, however, but also to spiritual relationships, as evidenced in the case of Cleopatra. She leveraged her power to reassign her position in the binary from male/female to that of the religious symbol/follower by playing down her femininity in the eyes of her people. Using her influence, she reassigned her power position using coins and religious iconography. These were stamped with purposely unattractive images to stress her role as the leader over her image as an attractive woman in domains where she needed to legitimize her rule and the rule of her nation (Riad, 2011). By doing this, she was able to take charge of Egypt’s political affairs and distance herself from the sexually charged male/female binary, therefore legitimizing her power. This type of leveraging one’s binary position requires a strategic representation of the self. Turner exemplifies this strategic representation in her subtle rebellions against female stereotypes by refusing to allow a male superior to leverage his power in the gender binary over her self-expression in the form of selected clothes.

Both outside and within the professional environment, Turner was often reprimanded for her unconventional apparel but with different cultural subtexts. The first instance occurred when she was seen by Mr. Spaulding, a male superior of North Carolina Mutual, wearing denim pants on her front porch. He tried to have her fired when the office manager ignored his complaint as did Turner, who continued to wear pants outside of the office (Weare, 90). In another incident Turner wore a red dress to work one day, “the dress that wasn't fancy or anything, but it was red”

was quickly reprimanded by Mr. Spaulding, who was affectionately known as Poppa (Weare, 90). She never wore the dress again. The different reactions to these two instances highlight the different perceptions of masculinizing dress versus feminizing dress. Turner leveraged her power as an independent woman that didn’t require a man to tell her what to wear when she projected

herself on an equal footing with men by wearing pants. In contrast, however, she grudgingly accepted her subordinate role in the power dynamic related to feminizing herself through a provocatively colored dress and did not repeat this sexualization of her appearance again.

Mirroring Cleopatra’s strive to legitimize her rule, Turner sought to legitimize her identity as an equal opportunity employee and citizen by protecting her right to masculinize her appearance but also avoiding an overly sexualized feminine appearance.

As evidenced in both Cleopatra’s and Tuner’s cases, the main binary a person embodies is based on a gender schema, and that initial binary of male/female majorly shapes the

interpretation of leadership ability. Both Cleopatra and Turner embodied a gender schema that differed from the stereotype of a leader. This difference nudged them to escape their binary, Cleopatra with her strategic marketed image and Turner with her quiet refusal to accept a stereotyped gender-based appearance requirement. There are, obviously, vital differences between the two of them outside of their obvious power differentials. Cleopatra was extremely sexualized by almost all historical accounts, with the exception of Arab scholars who credited her with great academic prowess. This was done in order to strip her successful legacy of legitimacy and reduce her intellectual influence because of her successes as a woman in a male dominated world and what that meant for challenging Greek and Roman egos (Riad 2011). Turner did not face the same kind of sexualized environment as backlash to her success most likely because of her slow rise to power, enlightened time period, in comparison, and selective rebellions against particular gender schema. While these differences are pronounced, both women’s attempts to work against their gender binary took a similar course.

Vial, Napier, and Brescoll’s paper discusses the persistence of gender bias in leadership positions despite the educational advances accomplished by women. The issue is not in finding a

path to attaining leadership positions but in the continued bias that women face about their ability to perform leadership tasks in the position. The authors proposed a theoretical model that hypothesized lower legitimacy perceptions of female leaders in relation to male leaders. This model posits that women are likely to exhibit backlash avoidance behaviors, in interactions with their subordinates leading to their lower legitimacy perceptions. Backlash refers to the self-reinforcement cycle that maintains the status quo and reinforces gender bias, which is not limited to male bias towards females, however, but persists across both genders (Vial, Napier, and Brescoll, 2015). Turner experienced an intra-gender backlash, as she noted, “I think that I had more potential resentment coming from the girls. Girls don't like to work with women” (Weare, p. 65). Viola recognized that this backlash was the product of power, status, and authority. In her view, the professional experience and interpersonal talents of the leader, influence the degree to which the leader is respected and admired. Therefor legitimate power had to be deserved and justified in the eyes of the leaders’ subordinates. The resulting power differentials reflect the perception of the difference in power between the subordinates and the leader. The ideal leader that has attained legitimacy and high status in the eyes of the subordinates, does not rely of formal power, and keeps power differentials low. This is problematic for female leaders because subordinates may create backlash and allot their female leaders lower status. Thus, forcing them to increase formal power and power differentials that will yield to subsequently lower legitimacy perceptions. In effect, this combination of low status and high power differentials leads to backlash avoidance behaviors in female leaders.

This backlash avoidance creates three different behavioral issues for women leaders (Vial, Napier, and Brescoll, 2015). As leaders, females are seldom unaware of the biases they face, and this unawareness exacerbates the perception of illegitimacy creating “precarious leader

psychology” of an ineffective leader focused on “avoiding losses and mistakes, and maintaining his or her powerful position” (Vial, Napier, and Brescoll, 2015, p.11). “Aggressive leader behavior” is also a common result of backlash avoidance where a female leader concerned with her legitimacy will act in a “explicitly dominant” manner to assert her authority. This was even an expected leadership behavior of Turner when she confronted a subordinate who assumed

“after she had made quite an error in my department and expected me to explode” (Weare, 64).

There is also a problem with the flip side, however, called “tentative leader behavior” in which females give up face time and lower status by appearing incompetent rather than unobtrusive. In other words, there seems to be no winning formula for a female leader to simultaneously address these biases and also rise above them to reach a similar level of status and power differentials as their male counterparts.

All of these expected stereotypic behaviors create a circular reference in which the female leaders are trapped, and therefore face illegitimacy (Vial, Napier, and Brescoll, 2015). The problem of illegitimacy also intersects with race biases but this curiously does not necessarily create lower legitimacy. Black women are often viewed as more competent and better aligned with the stereotypically masculine leadership prototype in relation to white women. This could apply to Viola Turner’s case as race and gender were both issues for her when networking in Wall Street. It is important to note, however, that not all stereotypically feminine characteristics create higher illegitimacy concerns. Warmth and communality, for example, serve to attenuate power differentials and contribute to legitimization (Vial, Napier, and Brescoll, 2015). This means that there is an entrepreneurial solution to the illegitimacy question for women that does not mean dissolving all feminine identity and conforming to a male gender schema. This intersecting identity entrepreneurship could be the transformational approach as it is the most

effective at encompassing stereotypically female characteristics while simultaneously increasing legitimacy. This approach embraces female characteristics and “may allow female leaders to sidestep behaviors that highlight power differentials” by being more encouraging and positive in opposition to a more masculine approach (Vial, Napier, and Brescoll, 2015, p.12). Turner exemplifies the transformational leadership style in several instances but most specifically in the aforementioned incident where she had to confront a subordinate about a mistake. Turner’s reaction in that situation was to nothing “but help her correct what she had done” (Weare, 64).

This isn’t the only instance in which Turner used honey instead of vinegar, per se, engaging her feminine characteristics instead of working against the tide and taking on masculine

characteristics.

Chapter VI: Discussion of Findings Uncovering a Shift in Turner’s Moral